I took the name of this blog from a
line in Franz Kafva’s diaries. Have you ever read Kafva’s
diaries? I wholeheartedly recommend it. They’re hilarious. And
beautiful. And kind of terrifying. Don’t read too much in
one sitting, or you might get infected by the breathtaking depths of
his melancholy.
In small doses, I find them intensely
comforting. I mean, just listen to this:
JANUARY 20: The end of writing. When will it take me up again?JANUARY 29: Again tried to write, virtually useless.JANUARY 30: The old incapacity. Interrupted my writing for barely ten days and already cast out. Once again prodigious efforts stand before me. You have to dive down, as it were, and sink more rapidly than that which sinks in advance of you.FEBRUARY 7: Complete standstill. Unending torments.
Magnificent, isn’t it? Who among us
hasn’t been there, right? And they just go on and on like this. I like to
turn to a random page and read a few lines whenever I need a quick
pick-me-up. Hey, I think to myself, at least I’m doing better than
this dude.
The other part of this blog’s title
up there, “A Writer’s Blog,” makes me feel kind of weird. It’s
still hard for me to identify myself as a writer. There’s a big part of me feels
like you shouldn’t get to use that word about yourself until you’ve
actually been published. Which is dumb.
Money is not what makes an artist or
craftsperson authentic. For instance, I like to knit. I have knit
many things. I am a knitter, despite the fact that I’ve never sold
my knitting for profit. No one would argue with this. So this idea
that in order to call yourself a writer you have to have sold a piece
of writing for publication is ridiculous. That’s what I keep
telling myself, anyway.
Besides, with the accessibility of
self-publishing these days, basically anyone can publish any random
collection of words and make a few dollars off of it. This guy got
to No. 9 on Amazon’s bestseller charts with a book that was
literally the word “fart” repeated 100,000 times. The internet is
a capricious mistress, my friends.
Also, I have in fact been paid for my
writing before. Back when I worked in public relations and
advertising I wrote articles on Olympic-style boxers and ad copy on
that super-cool new PowerBook featured in Mission: Impossible, and
that writing was published in trade journals and newspapers and
national magazines. So. I am a writer.
As of recently, I am also a novelist.
My first completed novel has just gone out to my trusted readers, and
now here I sit, waiting for comments and feedback. Trying not to
agonize over the fact that people I love are, at this very moment, judging
and criticizing this precious thing that I have been slaving over for the last
few years of my life. (I said I was a writer, never said I was a fast writer.)
I think I’ll go read a couple pages
of Kafka’s diaries to make myself feel better …
